The Ever-Rising Video Game Backlog

So back in December 2015, I set up a New Year’s goal to not buy a video game unless I was going to play it immediately. To help with this, I unsubscribed from countless emails to remove temptations. As of mid-May, I have gotten better in my spending, but not to the standard of the original goal.

On May 16th, I had a rare opportunity to play a video game. I scrolled through Steam, and for the life of me, could not decide what I wanted to play. I had choice overload. So I ended up messing around in Minecraft for a bit. After that, I decided to try to fix the situation. As opposed to scrolling through all my games, why not prioritize what I want to play? Not the full numerical 1-xx, but just a priority status, such as high, med, low, ignore. So I built the list and between all the services on my PC and my individual consoles, I have 447 games which do not include duplicate titles, which typically happens with bundles. If I were to add in expansion packs (such as StarCraft II’s Heart of the Swarm), which to me count as games, I have 462. This includes separating out the individual games within collections, such as Rare Replay, Mega Man Legacy Collection, and Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection. Number one, that number is beyond ridiculous, I have some serious issues. Number two, how the heck am I going to chip away at the backlog when I can’t even decide what to play?

So how many games and expansion packs do I have in my backlog? 387 games. This means, out of everything I own, I can only say I have completed 60 games. Why do I have 447 games again? So I am going through the games and giving them a priority. Once that is completed, in Steam I will make a ‘High Priority’ category and have those games there. I will only choose from those games. I shall not scroll past. Any sequels of high priority automatically got medium priority. This is to ensure completion of a series as a whole.

As it stands right now, I have 14 Highs, 26 Mediums, 279 Lows, and 71 Ignores. The majority of the ones I am ignoring are part of the collections. Really older games that I am not sure how much enjoyment I would actually get out of them. I am sure as I ponder on this list more, some of those lows will become ignores.

What I would like to do, is have one game I focus on until completion. However, I’d like to break it up every so often and give a low priority game a try for about 2 hours. Because I like to write, provide a written review based on those 2 hours and decide whether or not I want to continue playing it at some point or put it in the ignore bucket.